The Education Faculty of Education Forum in Toronto has given me an ideal opportunity to curate the set of initiatives that have started to take shape in this first year of my appointment at the University of Ottawa around the idea of “building capacity for innovation”. Around the poster, I have had several productive conversations with colleagues from around the province on the ways they are working to construct. Here’s the poster. Credit to Dany at Reproduction & Design in Chelsea, QC for the graphic design.

Thanks to my colleagues Tracy Crowe and Paul McGuire for their collaborations.

Students in EDU5287: Emerging Technologies and Learning have worked tirelessly this semester to create an ebook! It has been a learning process for all of us — but the results are finally available to share. The book is a collection of chapters, each published by a student in the course. Topics are incredibly diverse, but bring together interdisciplinary perspectives on technologies and the ways that educators in schools, universities, businesses, medical schools, and community health care centres leverage a range of technological solutions to support learning.

The book is free and is Creative Commons licensed (Attribution, NonCommercial, Share Alike).

You can access it by clicking on the Buy Now button.

I will document in a separate post the how-to process, in case folks are interested in using Lulu.com to publish work with their own students.

The final week of the teacher education program is upon us at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Education — and it is punctuated by a two-day series of professional learning seminars for teacher education candidates. I’ll be presenting to a group of students today on online inquiry. My presentation brings together some of my current thinking and understanding on this issue. The presentation starts by framing the importance of online inquiry for today’s learners. It provides a few facts to frame our thinking about the complexities of the digital literacies landscapes our learners must navigate. It offers some research on the strategies that expert online readers and researchers use as they construct an integrated understanding of a topic using multiple information sources. It provides some information on teaching methods that have been shown to support, at least in part, the development of fundamental online inquiry strategies.

Most importantly, I hope the session prompts students to generate their questions about digital literacies, and gets them thinking critically about how to support digital literacies learning through their own teaching practices.

I spent some time speaking with Rebecca Hogue @rjhogue this morning about the e-patient advocacy work she does on her blog http://bcbecky.com

Rebecca is a Doctoral Student at the University of Ottawa and her dissertation will document and analyze the impact of her blog on readers. It’s important, inspiring work that sits at the intersections of several areas of study including, but probably not limited to, literacy, technology, health, community, culture, relationships, learning. And so, I asked Rebecca if she might have 30 minutes or so to share some of her thoughts about the role of social media to support learning for students in my #EDU5287 Class called Emerging Technologies and Learning.

Interestingly, several students in my class are health care professionals themselves. I hope the conversation is especially supportive of their learning. I hope it helps to expand conceptions of social media and the ways that they might leverage patient blogs to teach, and to inform their clinical practices.

Key points from Rebecca’s talk include:

Patient blogs can give clinical professionals access to the ways that patients think about their disease. Rebecca described the example of one physician who reads patient blogs to gain access to the ways that non-specialists describe what is happening to their bodies, or in their bodies. This has helped the physician to understand and interpret patients’ words and, importantly, to diagnose patients.

Access to other patients’ treatment plans has empowered Rebecca to attend medical team meetings with a conversation starter. She values the special disciplinary knowledge that her medical care team brings to the conversations, of course, but she has found it helpful to present information informed, in part, by others’ experiences so that she feels all possibilities are explored before decisions are taken for her particular treatment plan.

Rebecca offered many insights about how to use social media to tell her story without revealing information that is too sensitive, or might give any insight into the identities of her physicians. This is an important one for all educators to think about. Rebecca has a website called http://shouldiblog.org/ for anyone considering blogging their lived experiences with Cancer. It is of value to anyone starting a blog, in my view. The issues she explores on the site are germane to K-12 teachers, counselors, and health care professionals too.

Evidence of impact in Rebecca’s work often comes in the form of comments that people share. “You helped me to understand my sister’s experiences” or even just “thank you” give Rebecca some perspective on how her social media work is supporting her readers.

I will be starting data collection for a new research study this week, and as I try to work out the nuts and bolts of my data management workflows, I discovered that I might save time on transcription by using the Speech Recognition Add On in Google Docs. The big upside here is that Speech Recognition is free and available to everyone on my research team.

Here is what I am going to try:

Record conversations using iPhone Voice Memo App (be sure there is enough memory on phone BEFORE I go to the interview!)

Share the audio recording to my Google Drive from my phone. Because I have synchronized my Google Drive with my phone, this is a one-touch solution. Very streamlined.

When I am ready to transcribe, I can then download the audio recording to my laptop.

Open a New Google Document.

Open the Speech Recognition Add On.

Start Speech Recognition Add On.

Play Audio File.

Watch the transcription happen automatically — or do other things 🙂

Clean up the transcription (which will take a little time, but not as much time as it would take to transcribe from scratch).

Here is a quick screencast that demonstrates the workflow. I had already recorded the audio file on my phone, uploaded it and then downloaded to my laptop.

I will provide an update on how it goes with actual data. Certainly, conversation will make the speech-to-text more complicated. However, given that transcription is (a) mind-numbing and (b) a barrier to timely sharing of research findings, I think it is well worth a try.

I am privileged to teach pre-service teachers in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa.

This semester, I’ve been teaching a course focused on fundamental concepts, frameworks and practices for unit and lesson design. It’s called PED 3141 (we use #PED3141 to share resources on Twitter). Because I am new to UOttawa and to this course, I wasn’t sure how things were going to go. It quickly became obvious to me that my pre-service teachers, in the first months of their professional program, would benefit from access to a range of perspectives on how to design learning experiences for diverse learners from people who do this work every day — teachers. I have therefore started what I hope will grow into a vibrant and incredibly useful collection of short conversations with practicing teachers. The conversations will focus on particular topics or issues that new teachers are learning to think about (and that experienced teachers continue to think about!)

I recorded the first two conversations this month. They both focus on differentiation of instruction to meet all students’ needs in the complex ecologies of our classrooms.

The first one is with Angela F, an Ontario Certified Teacher working in a school board west of Toronto.

The second one is with Jennifer A.. She is a Certified Teacher and Professional Coach with expertise in special education. She works in a school district in the greater Los Angeles region of California.

Thank you Angela and Jennifer for your insights and for sharing your knowledge with pre-service colleagues.